Main menu

Strict military censorship covered up much of what was really happening in the trenches

PHOTO: Archive photo, "Official Photographs"Bodies of dead German soldiers are seen in a destroyed trench on the Western Front. Photos like these were censored from the public during the First World War, but word of the carnage got out by other means.

by Michael Nicholson,The Daily Telegraph
Originally published: August 5, 2014

War correspondents fight on many fronts. Censorship is the most persistent and pernicious. From William Russell reporting the war in the Crimea to the wars of today, the correspondent struggles to tell it how it is.

The censor comes in many guises but usually in uniform, and his veto is final. A state of war exists between the reporter and the establishment – and the reporter invariably loses. It was never more thoroughly and tragically so than in the First World War.

The conspiracy to hide the scale of casualties condemns the principal conspirators, British prime minister David Lloyd George and Lord Kitchener, minister for war and munitions. Kitchener had been vehemently hostile to journalists ever since the Sudan. He had seen no reason for them to be there and was outraged by the slightest criticism in reports of his war against the Dervishes, the Mahdi’s army. “Get out of my way, you drunken swabs!” he shouted at them on his arrival in Khartoum.

Within months of the declaration of war, he introduced blanket press censorship, the most severe by any British commander yet. In the first year of the war, all press accreditation was refused. The public, anxious to understand the reason for British involvement in a Continental conflict, had to be satisfied with clumsy propaganda from the government’s newly formed Press Bureau that censored even military communiques before passing them on for publication. Its mantra was simple: “Do nothing. Say nothing. Keep off the front pages.”

David Lloyd George, who was soon to become prime minister, told C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, that if people knew what was going on in the trenches, the war would be stopped immediately. At the time, the government even denied trenches existed.

Kitchener was adamant. There would be no press anywhere near the action. Instead, he appointed the loyal and subservient Colonel Ernest Swinton as the official war correspondent, later joined by a conscripted journalist, Henry Tomlinson. Only untrained, army cameramen were allowed anywhere near the Front. Their filming was amateur, under-exposed, grainy – and more often than not faked.

British journalists, as well as those from other countries based in London, were obliged to write stories of a war that was just across the English Channel, relying entirely on the barely believable and infantile releases from the Press Bureau. It prompted Winston Churchill, then at the Admiralty, to complain about “the fog of war”, a phrase that has echoed down the corridors of every news organization ever since.

In this 1918 file photo, members of the Red Cross sort the backpacks of dead and wounded soldiers in France, during the First World War.Archives, The Associated Press

It could not continue. The truth of what was happening on the Western Front was filtering back by other means, much of it from returning wounded troops. The British public, saturated by the daily barrage of government propaganda, became more suspicious, more inquisitive and newspaper editorials more vociferous.

In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. president, wrote to the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, warning him that barring journalists from the Front “was harming Britain’s cause in the United States”. Prime minister Asquith and Kitchener bent to the president’s will. In March, four journalists were invited, under strict supervision, to visit the British Field Headquarters during the battle of Neuve Chapelle, among them the war artist and correspondent Frederic Villiers of The Graphic and Illustrated London News. Others, including Henry Nevinson of The Daily Chronicle, joined the fleet on its way to the Dardanelles. It was Nevinson who, reporting later from the Western Front, coined the phrase “lions led by donkeys” in his criticism of the High Command.

Two months later, permanent accreditation was given to five more reporters but on a severely censored “pooled” basis, the five sharing their information for general distribution to all news outlets in the United Kingdom and abroad.

In another more sinister development kept secret at the time, a register was kept by the War Office of reporters “whose patriotism was in no doubt, were on the military’s side, could be trusted to comply with regulations and not betray military information to the enemy either by accident or design”.

The military were less than subtle in their wooing of the few correspondents permitted to witness the fighting. They were given officer rank, special quarters, often a grand requisitioned house, ate officer’s rations and provided with transport and army driver. But journalists paid for the privilege as censorship was ratcheted up.

They were accompanied at all times by a “minder”, mostly junior officers who despised the press and made it their business to obstruct them. Dispatches were examined by a senior staff officer who had the authority of immediate veto before they were relayed to the War Office. There a press officer, usually a minor bureaucrat and suffering no crisis of conscience, moulded the stories to suit the official version. They were then sent by couriers to the newspapers but with no indication that what they were about to print bore any resemblance to the stories their reporters had written.

Phillip Gibbs was sent by The Daily Telegraph to France soon after the outbreak of the war and he quickly became hyper-critical of the British command and its determination to suppress the truth. He managed to smuggle some reports back to his newspaper describing conditions in the trenches that appalled readers. But when Gibbs revealed the bitterness and hostility between officers and other ranks, sometimes bordering on mutiny, Kitchener decided enough was enough. Gibbs was arrested on charges of “aiding and abetting the enemy” and warned he would be put up against a wall and shot.

Instead, he was given a military escort back to Britain and told he would not be allowed to return. He was not out of favour for long, such was the influence of the newspaper. A month later he was given full military accreditation and returned to the Front, where he stayed for the rest of the war. His output was prodigious but even he paid the price, submitting, as most did, to ever sterner censorship.

This note to his editor was never published: “Journalism has been throttled. We are so desperate for information that we will report any scrap of any description, any glimmer of truth, any wild statement, rumour, fairy tale or deliberate lie, if it fills the vacuum.” He had his revenge when the war was over, publishing his memoirs, The Realities of War, in which he gave a very caustic and unflattering portrait of Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

There were other honourable exceptions, those who preferred to write nothing rather than government untruths. Some found ingenious ways to avoid military control. Henry Hamilton Fyfe of the Daily Mail, having angered the generals with a smuggled dispatch, was threatened with arrest and deportation. He joined the French Red Cross as a stretcher-bearer and continued reporting.

Tending a wounded German on the battlefield of Vimy Ridge.Canada. Dept. of National Defence, Library and Archvies Canada

Another was Charles a Court Repington. He was a former Lt. Colonel in the Rifle Brigade and had served in Afghanistan, Burma, in the Sudan under Kitchener and as a staff officer in the Boer War. After an affair with a fellow officer’s wife became public, he was forced to resign his commission but was promptly offered the post of military correspondent for Lord Northcliffe’s Times. Repington had privileged access to senior officers and diplomats that enabled him to bypass the restrictions that so frustrated his colleagues. His high-ranking contacts fed him valuable titbits of information, assuming that as an officer and a gentleman they could depend on his discretion and confidentiality. This cosy relationship abruptly ended with his scoop, remembered as the “Shells Crisis” story.

In May 1915, in conversation with the BEF Commander-in-Chief General Sir John French, Repington was told that a shortage of shells had contributed to the failure of the attack on Neuve Chapelle and Auber’s Ridge two months earlier, resulting in appalling casualties. Repington wrote: “The want of an unlimited supply of high-explosive shells was a fatal bar to our success.”

The story caused a furore that forced Asquith to dissolve his Liberal government and form a coalition. French was replaced by Haig, and newspapers demanded Kitchener’s resignation. He kept his seat in cabinet but was replaced as minister responsible for munitions by Lloyd George. Kitchener exacted his revenge on Repington by ensuring he was promptly barred from the Western Front, an order not reversed for another year and then only under pressure from the new government. Repington became a campaigner for a national army, later known as the Territorials. Towards the end of the war, he resigned from The Times after a disagreement with Northcliffe over his style of reporting and promptly joined the Morning Post. He was later arrested and charged, under the Defence of the Realm Act, with disclosing classified military information in an article. After he was found guilty and fined, he wryly commented that the military had a long memory and a revengeful, unforgiving nature.

Despite all the frustration and humiliation they had to endure, there was little resistance from national newspapers. In turn, reporters seemed resigned to a form of journalism that demanded they exchanged their professional integrity for the limited access the military provided. Many defended themselves, arguing that being near the battle front, whatever the restrictions, was better than sitting in London rewriting War Office handouts.

Men in the trenches were nauseated by reports that portrayed the war like a football match. Even the Battle of the Somme was initially reported as a victory, with some newspapers omitting to mention that, on the first day, 20,000 British troops were killed. After the war, some correspondents wrote of how deeply ashamed they were at what they had written, a shame compounded when the government offered them knighthoods, which many accepted. There were honourable exceptions, those who saw it as a bribe to keep their silence. Had they the courage to break that silence when it mattered most, how different it might have been.

- Michael Nicholson is the former chief foreign correspondent with ITN. His latest book, ‘A State of War Exists: Reporters in the Line of Fire’ (Biteback)

Lively discourse is the lifeblood of any healthy democracy and Postmedia encourages readers to engage in robust debates about our stories. But, please, avoid personal attacks and keep your comments respectful and relevant. If you encounter abusive comments, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. This site is using Facebook Comments. Visit our FAQ page for more information.